Empires Of The Word Part 26

How, then, has the language come to be transplanted into Brazil so effectively, but nowhere else? The reasons are, of course, historical, but also political and above all economic. In brief, Brazil was the only one of its colonies where Portugal found both a significant source of wealth which was attractive to immigrants, and no pre-existing power strong enough to resist its domination.

India was certainly a source of wealth, from trade in a vast range of commodities; but the local powers that the Portuguese encountered there effectively resisted any Portuguese break-out from their coastal settlements. In Sri Lanka, known to them as Ceilao, the Portuguese at one time had effective control, and might well have established themselves, and perhaps their language, in the long term if they had not soon been expelled by the Dutch. Farther east, in the islands of the East Indies, the Portuguese looked for profit from the trade in spices; but the bottom fell out of the market for these commodities too soon. It is in any case arguable-not least from comparing the fate of other European empires in Asia-that the kind of wealth derivable from trade with these countries was never going to attract large numbers of immigrants, and so build a large Portuguese-language community. Trade requires capital, or at least a significant military force to impose terms; as a result, governments and large-scale organisations have an overwhelming advantage. Where trade, rather than production, is the source of wealth, the only way for large numbers of immigrants and small-scale outsiders to take part is if they become pirates.

In Africa, although Portugal had held small settlements all down the western coast since the fifteenth century, princ.i.p.ally as staging ports for the carreira da india, no serious source of wealth besides the slave trade was ever discovered. They never attracted large numbers of Portuguese-speaking settlers. But this trade contributed mightily, at one remove, to the spread of Portuguese in South America. Of the 10 million African slaves s.h.i.+pped to the Americas between 1526 and 1870, 3.6 million went to Brazil alone,12 at first to provide labour for sugar plantations, later for cotton and tobacco. As in the other slave economies of the Americas, the Africans could not bring their languages with them. They were in contact with too few of their ex-neighbours to speak those languages, for the slave markets distributed them without regard to origin all over the colonies, and they had perforce to learn the language of their new masters. Often too those very masters would become the fathers of their children; in a very few generations most of the population came to be of mixed blood, but nonetheless speakers just of Portuguese.

White immigration too was more substantial into Brazil than to anywhere else in the Portuguese possessions. Early on, neither Portugal's court nor its people had taken much interest in their American colony, since it had unaccountably not yielded anything like the copious gold and silver that the Spanish were extracting from their colonies in Mexico and Peru.

But the hostile attentions of other European powers, and the effort needed to repel them, then concentrated Portugal's sense that here was something worth having. The Spanish had respected the claims in accord with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas-indeed, from 1580 to 1640 Spain and Portugal were united under a single (Spanish) government-but other powers that were not party to it had been more dangerous. The French had posed the first challenge in 1555, with raids and attempted settlements that persisted until 1615, then the English (less seriously) from 1582 to 1595. Most aggressive were the Dutch. After some early inconsequential attacks in 1598-9, from the 1620s until 1641 they succeeded in taking possession of the whole of the Brazilian north-east from Sao Luis to Aracaju, and holding it until 1654. In 1624 they had even briefly taken the very heart of the Portuguese colony, its first capital at Baia (also called Salvador). The Portuguese seem to have found the determination, and hence the resources, to retake them only when they resigned themselves finally to the loss of most of their colonies in India and beyond. (Indeed, as we shall soon see, those became the next target of the Dutch.) A series of resolute expeditions had mapped out most of the interior by the mid-seventeenth century. Known as bandeiras, 'flags', they were inspired by the (mostly unavailing) quest for gold, silver, jewels or natives to capture as slaves. Their main success had lain in pre-emptively defining borders with Spain's colonies that were being rather less actively explored from the opposite side of the continent. (The borders were actually agreed a hundred years later in the Treaties of Madrid, 1750, Pardo, 1761 and Ildefonso, 1777, which finally erased the notional Line of Tordesillas.) Despite these explorations, until the second half of the seventeenth century the only Portuguese to settle more than 400 kilometres from the coast had been the missionaries, especially the Jesuits. And as in the Spanish colonies, they had found it easier to preach in a language other than their own. Most of the local languages they called linguas travadas, 'hobbled tongues', so there was evidently little enthusiasm for them. In a celebrated sermon preached to a departing mission in 1657, Father Antonio Vieira said he had heard someone call the Amazon the 'rio Babel', for its eighty languages: 'What must it be to learn Nheengaiba, or Juruna, or Tapajo, or Teremembe, or Mamaiana, whose very names seem to strike terror?... To the Apostles G.o.d gave tongues of fire, but to their successors a fire of tongues. The tongues of fire came to an end, but the fire of tongues did not, because this fire, this spirit, this love of G.o.d makes one learn, study and know those languages.'13 For all this heady combination of language-learning and the love (or fear) of G.o.d, in Brazil it had turned out that Tupinamba (a language very closely related to the Guarani of Paraguay) could be used everywhere (see Chapter 10, 'Past struggles: How American languages had spread', p. 348), and it came to be called the lingua geral (the Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish lengua general). In the early days of the colony, it was the main means of communication with the natives. One Jesuit witness wrote, about 1560: 'Almost all who come to the Kingdom and are settled and in communication with the Indians get to know it within a short time, and the sons and daughters of the Portuguese born here get to know it better than the Portuguese do, mainly in the captaincy of Sao Vicente.'14 Organising the Indians into aldeias (villages) and reducaes (reserved areas), the Jesuits in fact resisted the inroads of other white settlers. This kind of resistance to a specifically colonial development of the interior was to last until the mid-eighteenth century. One effect was that the use of Portuguese remained confined to the coastal districts for the first two centuries of the colony's existence. Only in 1759 did the Jesuits lose their power to protect and organise the Indians in this way, when they were stripped of their powers and expelled from the country.* For good measure, the further use of the lingua geral was banned at the same time.

But Brazil was now to become a more appealing prospect for settlers. After the rea.s.sertion of Portuguese power in 1654, a stream of economic developments at last provided a motive for large-scale immigration from Europe, and with it the spread of the Portuguese language. Ore beds with gold, emeralds, diamonds and other precious stones were found in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, princ.i.p.ally in the southern central area henceforth called Minas Gerais, 'General Mines', but also inland in Baia, Goias and Mato Grosso. The result was the world's first gold rush, coming mostly from Portugal, and thereafter an eighteenth-century economy with government revenues founded securely on gold. When the gold ran out towards the end of that century, its place was taken by the export profits from cattle ranching, especially in sales of leather, an industry that had taken advantage of the opening up of ma.s.sive gra.s.slands in these same south and central areas.

The result was a ma.s.sive, and subsequently sustained, increase in Brazil's Portuguese-speaking population, both from immigration (including import of slaves), and from natural growth. This had comprised less than 150,000 around 1650; by 1770 they comprised over 1,500,000; and this in a period when the rest of the Americas (Spanish- and English-speaking alike) had just about doubled their numbers. In the same period, Brazil had come to provide the second and third most populous Portuguese-speaking cities in the world, Baia (Salvador) and Rio de Janeiro yielding only to Lisbon. This influx of rich and prolific immigrants from Europe, which reinforced the influx of uprooted slaves from Africa, crowded out the previous lingua geral of the interior, Tupinamba, to say nothing of the tiny languages spoken by individual tribes. It was estimated in 1985 that there were no more than 155,000 Brazilians who spoke indigenous languages, approximately one for every thousand speakers of Portuguese.15 Ultimately, then, the growth of Portuguese to its present status (176 million native speakers, ranking seventh in the world, ahead of German, French and j.a.panese) owes almost everything to the economic development, and consequent population growth, of Brazil over the past three hundred years, and very little to its spread from Portugal as a language for colonial administration, or as a lingua franca in Asia, both of which peaked over four hundred years ago.

Dutch interlopers

Saidjah kwam te Batavia aan. Hy verzocht een heer hem in deenst te nemen, hetgeen die heer terstond deed omdat hy Saidjah niet verstond. Want te Batavia heeft men gaarne bedienden die nog geen maleisch spreken en dus nog niet zo bedorven zyn als anderen die langer in aanraaking waren met europese beschaving. Saidjah leerde spoedig maleisch, maar paste braaf op...

Saidjah came to Batavia. He asked a gentleman to take him into service, which the gentleman at once did, because he did not understand Saidjah['s language]. For in Batavia people liked servants who did not yet speak Malay and so were not so spoiled as the others who had been longer in contact with European civilization. Saidjah learnt Malay quickly, but behaved well...

Multatuli, Max Havelaar (Amsterdam, 1860), ch. 17 Pelabur habis Palembang tak alah Rations finished, Palembang not beaten Malay proverb*

After a century of stability, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth, the Portuguese trading empire in Asia was lost almost as rapidly as it was built up. This was overwhelmingly due to the efforts of another small European power, the Dutch.* The Dutch speedily divested Portugal of the sources of its Asian incomes, and became a fixture in the East Indies for three centuries. But in our history of world languages, they have only a negative part to play. The Dutch career demonstrates that a successful European imperial power may yet leave little or no linguistic trace in its domains-further evidence, in fact, that Nebrija was wrong.

The Dutch imperial career began against the odds, almost as a commercial sideline in their war of independence from Spain, a struggle that was to last intermittently from 1568 to 1648, but which in fact, from 1588, allowed the burghers of the new republic of the United Provinces considerable freedom of action. Despite the uncertain times, the supply of luxury goods to northern Europe (mostly from Asia, and often by re-export from Portugal) had become proverbially 'rich trades' for Dutch merchants in the 1590s. Then in 1598 Dutch s.h.i.+ps, goods and merchants were embargoed from all ports in the Spanish/Portuguese empire. Minds were duly concentrated, and the immediate result was an explosion of East India trading enterprise-by 1601 fourteen Dutch fleets, with sixty-five vessels, had set sail on behalf of eight different companies.16 Such a splurge of compet.i.tion could only be adverse both at source in the Indies and in the customer markets of Europe, and so in 1602, with the collusion of all the companies involved, the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie-VOC) was founded as a state monopoly of such trade. Somewhat later, in 1624, a similar organisation, the West India Company (Westindische Compagnie-WIC) was established to control Dutch interests in the western hemisphere.

Of the two companies, WIC had far less long-term success as a procurer of Dutch real estate and colonial populations. It began well; from 1623 a tract of North America (covering most of what is now New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, and the southern half of New York State) was taken as 'Nieuw Nederland', and outright conquests from Portugal followed, of the Guinea coast in 1637-42, of northern Brazil (as 'Nieuw Holland') in 1631, of Angola in 1641, as well as the acquisition of less crucial holdings in the Antilles and Guyanas. Around 1640, WIC was in control of the Atlantic markets in sugar, slavery and furs. But by 1665 all but the Antilles and Guyanas had been lost. Besides the recaptures by Portugal, Nieuw Nederland was taken forcibly by England (and New Amsterdam became New York) in 1664. WIC retrenched to being a simple trading company, making a good living where previously it had aspired to rule. There was still plenty of gold in Guinea, and a demand for African slaves in the Netherlands. Dutch remained, in the small colonies, as a language of administration. Nowadays there are a bare thousand native speakers of Dutch in the republic of Suriname (Dutch Guiana), while perhaps a quarter of the half-million population use it as a second language. The Antilles remain for the most part dependent on the Netherlands, but fewer than 10 per cent of the 185,000 people have Dutch as a first language.

The VOC, on the other hand, went on to real colonial greatness. In the East Indies, the source of the spice trade, they displaced the Portuguese permanently from Ambon, and later Ternate and Tidore, in the Moluccas (1605-62), Malacca in Malaya (1641), and Maca.s.sar (modern Ujung Pandang) in Sulawesi (1667). They also went beyond the scope of Portugal's holdings by seizing Jakarta in western Java (1619) as their centre of operations (comparable to Goa for the Portuguese), and renaming it Batavia.* Through intrigue rather than war, they displaced the Portuguese as monopolists in the j.a.pan trade (1639), with a permanent base in Nagasaki. In the Indian subcontinent, they established an early foothold at Pulicat (1613), and between 1638 and 1661 they took from the Portuguese Ceylon and their whole string of southern Indian possessions from Kannur round to Negapatam. In Africa, they were unable for long to dislodge the Portuguese from Angola or Mozambique, but went on to found their own South African colony in between at Cape Town (Kaapstad) in 1652. Willem Bosman remarked in 1704 that the Portuguese had been 'as setting-dogs to spring the game, which as soon as they had done, was seized by others'.17 Curiously but significantly, it was only in Africa that their colonial intrusiveness bore any linguistic fruit. It was here that Dutch settlers were attracted, just as Brazil, in the end, attracted settlers from Portugal. The Dutch settlers were not merchants, nor miners, but farmers (i.e., in Dutch, Boer). Their language, a mildly simplified version of Dutch that came to be known as Afrikaans ('African'), developed and grew with their population, even after the British had gained control of the country.* Subsequently, in 1836, tiring of British rule, they spread out on the Great Trek, into the east of what is now South Africa, to found the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Their influence was reduced temporarily after their defeat by the British in the Boer War of 1899-1902. But numbers prevailed in the white community-as they were later to do as between black and white-and in the following half-century Afrikaans came to be explicitly the language of the South African ruling majority. Afrikaans in 1991 had 6.2 million speakers in South Africa, centred in Pretoria and Bloemfontein, a million of them native bilinguals with English. Another 4 million there were using it as a second or third language. Taking all of them together, the 10 million who know the language compare significantly with the 20 million or so who now speak Dutch worldwide (13.4 million in the Netherlands, another 5 million in Belgium).18 Farther east, Dutch presence proved shorter lasting. Ceylon and southern India, like the Cape colony, pa.s.sed into British hands at the turn of the eighteenth century as a side effect of political changes in Europe. The century and a half of Dutch influence that was then brought to an end is hard now to discern. But although there was some similar back-and-forth in the East Indies-during which a thirty-year-old Stamford Raffles became for five years lieutenant-governor of Java, and chanced on the lost Buddhist wonder city of Borobodur-it ended with the British contenting themselves with the Malay peninsula and the northern coast of Borneo. Dutch control of the islands was ultimately maintained; in fact it lasted until the Second World War, a full three hundred years from their original dispossession of the Portuguese.

Why, then, is Dutch not now the official government language, or at least a lingua franca, in the state of Indonesia, the successor of the Dutch East Indies? Given that Dutch is another Germanic language, one is almost tempted to detect a 'curse of Germanic'. Remember that despite their awesome conquests in western Europe and North Africa in the fifth century AD, the Franks, Vandals and Goths, alone among the great conquerors of the era, had never spread their language across their domains. And now, in the modern age from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, their descendants the Dutch were no more capable of winning new speakers for their language, when around them the British were spreading English in Malaya, Portuguese was persisting in its enclave on Timor, the Spanish were trying to bring up the Philippines in Castilian, and indeed the French were attempting to seed Indo-China as an outpost of francophony.

The fundamental reason for the curious absence of the Dutch language is the pragmatism of its speakers in the Indies.* They were there, after all, with two motives: primarily to make money, and secondarily-a long way second-to spead Protestant Christianity in their own dear Calvinist form. In the event, both motives called for the use of a foreign contact language, rather than their own mother tongue. For trade, in the first instance, there was evidently a need to use whatever language came to hand; and it turned out that there was already a language that the trading community of the East Indies had had in common for at least two centuries, and perhaps much longer.

This was Malay, Bahasa Mclayu (or in Dutch spelling Bahasa Melajoe), best known as the jargon of merchants having dealings at the entrepot of Malacca. Malacca had been founded only at the beginning of the fifteenth century, but had grown very fast, through exploitation of its commanding position on the strait, and cultivation of the Chinese emperor. It is likely that the spread of the language had started earlier than this. Malacca had been founded by a wayward prince from ri Vijaya, a state that had cultivated wide trading interests from the seventh to thirteenth centuries AD. And Jambi, one of its princ.i.p.al cities, had also been called Malayu. Whatever Malay's origins, with this one language in hand a Dutch merchant could do business all over the Indies,* an added advantage since the VOC was always interested in trade all over the area, not just simple exports from the sources of supply to the Netherlands.19 Likewise, in order to spread the faith and practice of the Dutch Reformed Church, it was easier, and quicker, to make converts when one was not restricted to those who already knew Dutch, or who might be willing to learn it. Early on, there had been an attempt to establish schools at Ambon in Dutch, with as many as sixteen of them running in 1627. But there were in fact few opportunities for children who learnt the language to use it after they graduated, and so they tended to forget it.20 Probably this is a common feature of the early years of a language cohort, when they have not yet had time to be promoted up the system, and so are mostly dealing with adults who do not share the language. But the Dutch pragmatists were not prepared to wait, and the experiment was terminated. Malay became identified with Reformed religion too, designated as the language for 'a common indigenous Church'.21 We might briefly query why the Dutch pragmatism did not extend to making use of another pre-existing lingua franca in their domains, namely Portuguese, which we have already noted they were required to use in dealings in Ceylon, and had indeed spread, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, into their own centre of operations at Batavia. Certainly, some Dutch pastors, notably Francois Valentijn in the 1680s, were inclined to favour it over Malay in the work of the Church.22 It is notable that conversions, never very many, were found mostly in congregations that had previously been converted to Catholicism by the Portuguese; the Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims turned out to be largely impervious to the new creed. But the a.s.sociation between Portuguese and Catholicism remained strong in Dutch Calvinist hearts; and in business, there must also have been a residue of pride, resisting any place for the language of their defeated enemies-indeed, until 1640 and the separation of Spain and Portugal, their resented overlords-in the mechanism of their own organisation.

And so Malay became the language of the Dutch Indies, first as a practical short-term measure, but by the eighteenth century by official policy.* In 1731-3 the Bible was issued in a Malay translation by Melchior Leydekker and Georg Henrik Werndly, and the latter brought out a grammar of the language in 1736. But despite the attempts to preach in it, knowledge of the language did not penetrate particularly deeply. Malay was a means of communication among administrators, managers, merchants and rulers, and so it stayed. Given the highly devolved nature of Dutch imperial administration, which largely kept the native power chiefdoms in place and was mediated through them, this at first worked well.

But the subsequent history of the language as used in the Dutch Indies was not a smooth one. In the mid-eighteenth century, as world markets came to value coffee from Java over spices from Ambon, the need grew to have direct dealings with the Javanese rulers, whose knowledge of Malay had never been good. The return of Dutch administration after the British interregnum under Stamford Raffles (1811-16) was on a new basis: the VOC had been abolished in 1795 after a collapse in its profitability, and there was a new concern for administrators to be in contact with the subject population. A decree of 1811 called for officials to know Javanese. Raffles himself, when he took over, was very much in favour, opining in 1813: 'Hitherto the communication with inhabitants of the country has been chiefly through illiterate Interpreters, or when direct, through the medium of a barbarous dialect of Malays, confounded and confused by the introduction of Portuguese and Dutch.'23 But when the Dutch were back in charge, there followed a controversy, which was to last throughout the nineteenth century, concerning the relative weight to be given to Javanese and Malay, with resolutions in 1827, 1837 and 1839 promoting Malay again. The practical value of knowing the actual language of a majority of the people was clear, but the embarra.s.sing fact remained that Javanese, with elaborate inflexions and distinct sub-languages marking different levels of politeness, was far harder to learn tolerably than Malay. Results were never good, and most officials reverted to their broken and undignified, but always serviceable, dienst-Maleisch ('service-Malay'), known less respectfully as brabbel-Maleisch or klontong-Maleisch ('jabber-' or 'clod-Malay').24 For all its faults (a standard system of Romanised spelling was specified only in 190125) it is this Malay which has become the official language of the state of Indonesia, under the wishful t.i.tle of Bahasa Indonesia. Even today, though, only 17-30 million people there actually have it as a first language, perhaps a tenth of those who can use it as a second language. Compare this with the 75 million whose first language is Javanese, and the 726 languages that are listed as spoken somewhere within Indonesia. The Dutch, through their fitful policy, had succeeded in giving a common language to their old colony, but not their own.

La francophonie

La langue fransaise est une femme. Et cette femme est si belle, si fiere, si modeste, si hardie, si touchante, si voluptueuse, si chaste, si n.o.ble, si familiere, si folle, si sage, qu' on l' aime de toute son sme, et qu' on n' est jamais tente de lui etre infidele.

The French language is a woman. And that woman is so beautiful, so proud, so modest, so bold, so touching, so voluptuous, so chaste, so n.o.ble, so familiar, so mad, so wise, that one loves her with all one's soul, and is never tempted to be unfaithful to her.

Anatole France, 1844-1924 This quotation, widely known to speakers and lovers of French, is eminently but characteristically self-conscious and self-regarding.* The French have taken enthusiastically to the notion that their language has particular virtues, even-and this is curious for such an emotional and ethnocentric idea-that it is more rational than other languages. Perhaps more honestly than others set on global conquests, they came to a.s.sert that they were fulfilling a mission civilisatrice which went beyond the making of foreign profits for themselves, and foreign converts for their G.o.d.

The outcome, in terms of actual expansion of the language community of native and second-language speakers, what they call la francophonie,* has been modest, at least by the standards of its direct compet.i.tors (and neighbours): French can now count 77 million native speakers worldwide (two-thirds of them in France itself), and another 51 million second-language speakers. This places it tenth in the list of language populations, effectively the smallest of the major European languages, and less populous even than German, which is hardly spoken at all outside its home continent.

French in Europe

French is by origin the species of Romance spoken in Gaul, which was broadly taken to be the realm of the Franks. Its modern name for itself, fransais [fras], comes from the Germanic adjective frankisk, through the Latinisation franciscus. For political and topographical reasons, it came to be typified and led by the dialect of the Ile-de-France region in the north-east. The Ile-de-France has many navigable rivers heading in different directions, hence is a natural crossroads. And so it was a place where speakers of many dialects met, and differences were levelled out. What is more, from the time of Clovis (late fifth century) it mostly had the royal court of the Franks somewhere within it. Different cities flourished and waned, but by the thirteenth century the city of Paris evidently enjoyed a particular cachet; a poet wrote: Si m' escuse de mon langage Excuse my language, Rude, malostru et sauvage rude, ungainly and wild, Car nes ne sui pas de Paris. for I am not a native of Paris.26 A milestone in the early history of French was the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets in 1539, by which King Franois I, among many other provisions, required that official doc.u.ments, whether from courts or parish registers, should all be produced en langage maternel fronois et non autrement-in French mother tongue, and not otherwise, specifically not in Latin.27 But despite the homely-sounding phrase, the king was in fact referring to his own mother tongue, not that of his subjects: the act was interpreted as requiring the use of Parisian French, and so provoked merveilleuses complaintes ('wondrous complaints') in the Provencal-speaking south.28 The French political centre was henceforth to be language conscious, and to take action to enforce consistency at the official level, despite the persistence of different spoken languages in its realms.

What sort of language was French? To the ear, a major characteristic of French among its Romance cousins was the loss of almost all vowels in final syllables, and later of final consonants. (Final a usually survived, but was reduced to an indistinct [e] 'uh' sound.) This slack p.r.o.nunciation led to some major changes in the grammar, due to the breakdown of the Latin system of meaningful word endings (inflexion), at least in so far as they marked the function of nouns in sentences, and the person (I vs you vs he/she/it) of verbs. So French became a language with a rather rigid word order, and strings of short p.r.o.nouns up at the front of sentences. Where Latin had dico tibi illud, 'I tell you that', French has je te le dis [etetedi], and the Latin ending -o to mark the subject 'I' has effectively been replaced by a separable subject prefix je [].* But in other ways, French was rather like Portuguese, replacing n and m at the end of syllables with a nasalised tw.a.n.g, changing its y sound to [], and voicing s to [z] when it came between vowels. Common Romance unum bonum vinum rubium, 'a good wine red', became in France un bon vin rouge. L after a vowel mostly changed to [w] (as it does in c.o.c.kney and Estuary English), and was written with u: maledictum, 'cursed', came out as maudit, pellem, 'skin', as peau, collum, 'neck', as cou.

And French was also prey to some extreme processes of vowel strangulation, especially of what are called mid vowels, e and o: so much so that its precise p.r.o.nunciation has varied greatly down the centuries, and of course been given considerable scope for language sn.o.bbery, if people's diphthongs did not come out just right. These are the processes that have played havoc with French spelling, so that what was long ago written (and p.r.o.nounced, more or less) seniores regales famosi debent habere unum bellum palatium, 'famous royal lords must have a fine palace', came first to be p.r.o.nounced much as it is now spelt, les seigneurs royaux fameux doivent avoir un beau palais, but then went on to sound quite different: [le seinr rwayo fam dwavt avwar T bo palP].

In the early second millennium AD, this language began to spread outside France. Notably, in 1066 it was transplanted north of the English Channel, by Norman invaders, who themselves had been speaking it only for a couple of generations. (See Chapter 12, 'Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French', p. 458.) As it turned out, the advance of the language was not permanent. It flourished for over two centuries as a language for the elite in England, but gradually lost touch with the Ile-de-France. As Chaucer wrote of his Prioress towards the end of the fourteenth century: And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly

After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe

For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe.29

Then came the Black Death: a social revolution followed, and English-speaking commoners were able to move into more influential positions in the English cities. French died out in England.*

About the same time, the Crusades also spread French outside its native soil, but in the opposite direction. These military escapades derived most of their support from France, and they did succeed in setting up Frankish domains in Palestine which lasted out the twelfth century. Nevertheless, the language communities did not long survive the Muslim reconquests in the thirteenth. One long-term effect, though, was to create a special a.s.sociation of 'the Frank' with the idea of a European at large in the East-seen in the widespread Arab term for a European, feringi, and the still useful term lingua franca, denoting an unofficial language of wider communication, which was first used in the Levant.

The Parisian standard for French spread to neighbouring countries before the French state started its serious efforts to spread its power and language abroad. Neither Belgium nor Switzerland, whose boundaries have always included Romance speakers as long as both the boundaries and the language have existed, ever attempted to set up a competing national standard. Geneva had its own distinct Romance dialect, Savoyard, but has used French for official business since the thirteenth century; it was the effective capital of the French Protestants during the wars of the Reformation. Farther south are Savoy, Nice and Monaco. They all had historic links across the Alps, and long resisted becoming part of metropolitan France. But they have largely accepted its language.

Why did French gain such an a.s.sociation with high culture in Europe, especially spreading eastward? The fundamental reason was the growth of France's population and agricultural wealth; the rich of France could afford the best, and their taste was influential. France was the most densely populated country in medieval and early modern Europe, and so tended to set the standard for the rest. French became the business language of European merchants. And the same principle of geographical centrality that had made Paris the crossroads of France made France itself the crossroads of west European Christendom. In 1164 John of Salisbury wrote to Thomas a Becket: 'I took a detour by Paris. When I saw the abundance of foods, the happiness of the people, the consideration accorded to the clergy, the majesty and glory of the whole Church, the diverse activities of the philosophers, I thought I was seeing, filled with admiration, Jacob's ladder, its top touching the sky and angels pa.s.sing up and down upon it.'30 This situation did not change until the nineteenth century. France remained the richest and most populous country in Europe; its geographical advantages simply could not be challenged until the power base of European politics spread beyond western Europe. Certainly, the cultural predominance of French was shaken by the rise of the Italian city-states in the fifteenth-century Renaissance, and by the sixteenth-century Reformation, since the French king chose to a.s.sociate France resolutely with the Catholic Church. France itself ceased to be the centre of the action for a time, yet the Reformation prompted many influential French speakers to flee eastward: Huguenots, the French Protestants, took up residence in the Dutch- and German-speaking lands, and there was an explosion of French-language publis.h.i.+ng, especially just over the border in the Netherlands. The Reformation added to the French language's eastward momentum as a language of culture.

In the seventeenth century, French power and influence in Europe reached their height, during the long reigns of Louis XIII, 1610-43, and of Louis XIV, the famed Roi Soleil, 'Sun King', 1643-1715. Increasingly complacent, France began to reflect on its own cultural attributes. As all nations do when they enjoy pre-eminence, the French began to look for some particular virtues that could explain their success. Increasingly, they saw evidence of excellence in their language itself. Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII's prime minister, founded the Academie Franaise in 1635, with a concern that transcended the practical: by its statutes its princ.i.p.al function was 'to give certain rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and sciences'.

This was a new step in language consciousness, the world's first academy dedicated to the care of a language.* The particular concern of the French for accuracy and concision was crystallised at the time. In fact, the article of the Ordinances of Villers-Cotterets in 1539 which enjoined the use of French had been immediately preceded by one that required clarity of expression in court judgments: they were to be 'done and written so clearly that there would not be, nor could be, any ambiguity or uncertainty, nor place to ask for interpretation'. Now in 1637 the already famous philosopher Rene Descartes published his Discours de la methode. One notable feature of this work was that it was written in French, rather than Latin, acting perhaps in the radical spirit of the academy's statutes. Descartes was not willingly a revolutionary; indeed, one of his maxims in the Discours was to 'follow the most moderate opinions and those most remote from excess as were commonly received in practice by the most sensible of those he lived with', and 'change his desires rather than the order of the world'.31 But here, at the heart of the European intellectual debate, he proposed that knowledge must be founded exclusively on clear and distinct ideas.32 Abolis.h.i.+ng the need for divine revelation, this approach was new and radical, and came to be seen as quintessentially French.* It is often held to mark the beginning of modern philosophy and modern science, even if for Descartes, playing it safe as ever, it left all practical matters of faith and morals unchanged.

And the French belief in their linguistic advantages soon came to be shared by others not so fortunate. Descartes' great successor Leibniz (1646-1716), though a German from Leipzig, wrote all his major works in French. The intellectual superiority of French culture had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be read widely by the elite, one simply had in these days to write in French.

In the late seventeenth century, French culture, especially its cla.s.sic dramatists Corneille, Racine and Moliere, enjoyed a vogue throughout Europe, and Versailles set the standard everywhere for court style and etiquette. Novels in French were everywhere a favourite amus.e.m.e.nt for rich young ladies. It was especially in the areas of Europe with least cultural self-confidence that the elite set a high value on fluency in French: Sweden, Poland and above all Russia, where starting in the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96) French became established as the language of polite society. Voltaire, the great wit of the age, rejoiced famously that there were French speakers in Astrakhan, and French language teachers in Moscow.33 In Tolstoy's War and Peace, a novel whose action is set in the following generation, substantial parts of the dialogue, including the opening lines, are written-presumably for realism-not in Russian but in French.

It was in this period that French also replaced Latin as the language of diplomacy, giving it another link with elegance and influence. By 1642 Richelieu's government had been corresponding in French with most of their northerly neighbours: but Spain, Italy and Switzerland had kept up resistance to it, preferring their own languages. In the second half of that century, in negotiations with the Holy Roman Empire (whose domestic language was German), the French gradually presuaded them to s.h.i.+ft the language of communication from Latin to French. In the next century, from the Treaty of Rastatt in 1712, the two sides switched to French exclusively. Treaties came to be written in French, even by powers with no direct French connections. The Danes used it for their traite de commerce de Copenhague in 1691, and the Russians and Ottoman Turks in the terms of their 1774 peace made at Kuuk Kainarca (now Kaynarja in Bulgaria).34 The general popularity of France itself evidently took a dive after Napoleon's attempts in the early nineteenth century to conquer the whole of Europe, but French ceased to play its general intermediary role only in the twentieth century, ironically at Versailles itself, when during the 1919 peace conference held after the First World War the Americans and the British insisted on working in their own language, and so ensured that the treaty was drafted and published in both French and English.

The first empire

What of le fransais d' outre-mer, French overseas? Developments here were very different from the steady, and st.u.r.dy, spread of French round Europe through which it became, almost by spontaneous acclaim, the prestige language for elites. The projection of French overseas was very much a result of royal policy.

The policy came in two fits of colonial expansion directed by the French king, punctuated by comprehensive defeat and deflation in the second half of the eighteenth century. These fits of expansion were both extremely ambitious-in 1714, and again in 1914, France held the second-largest colonial empire by land area in the world*-but, aside from the sugar barons' domain in the Caribbean, each of them produced only one territory that was to attract substantial French immigration: Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Algeria in the nineteenth. In neither case was France, or its settlers, long able to retain political control; and so French imperialism has been more like Dutch in its linguistic effects than any of its other European compet.i.tors. That is to say, the French language has persisted only where its settlers have retained a solid ident.i.ty and a large population, even under foreign (specifically British) domination: French has survived and grown in Canada, just as Dutch (of a kind) has remained strong in South Africa. The situation in Algeria is clouded by politics.* But in the other colonies the French language has survived, if at all, as a lingua franca for the elite.

Although it was already a major power in the fifteenth century, France was not a player in the earliest voyages of exploration. Still, there was plenty of North America left to be claimed in the next few generations. Jacques Cartier, sent by the French king to discover a north-west pa.s.sage to the East, discovered instead the St Lawrence river and explored it as far as Quebec and Montreal (then Stadacona and Hochelaga) in 1534-6. Later, fur traders and missionaries enlarged the part of the new continent that could be claimed for France: in 1603-15 Samuel de Champlain entered the Great Lakes; in 1673 Pere Marquette and Louis Jolliet broke out southward into the Mississippi; and in 1678-82 Robert Cavelier de la Salle charted its whole course down to the Gulf of Mexico. France had thereby outflanked and surrounded the English colonies, which were being strung out along the Atlantic coast.

It was an unstable situation, however, since the English colonists heavily outnumbered the French, perhaps by forty to one in the mid-seventeenth century: they would still be twenty times more numerous a century later, when the French settler population had multiplied by ten.35 Arguably, the expulsion of French Protestants in the Reformation and afterward was at the root of this imbalance between the two powers. As we have seen, their departure had seeded the spread of French, as the language of culture and high thinking, into central and eastern Europe. But by the same token, France had lost the ma.s.s of its population of willing emigrants, the kind of puritans, adventurers and Utopians who formed the backbone of Britain's Thirteen Colonies. Nouvelle-France boasted a meteoric birth rate among those who came and stayed, but never became a magnet to immigrants equal to New England.

In the same period, largely with Richelieu in charge at home, French settlements were also being planted on the Caribbean islands of Martinique (1625) and Guadeloupe (1635), and at Cayenne on the mainland in Guyana (1637); on the other side of the Atlantic, the French claimed Senegal on the west African coast (1639) and Madagascar in the east (1643). Farthest of all, a French Jesuit missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes, made it in 1624 to southeastern Indo-China, then known as Cochin-China.*

However, the only parts of the extensive territories claimed for France which received significant settlement by French-speaking colonists were the St Lawrence river area, known as la Nouvelle-France (New France), and Nova Scotia, then known as l'Acadie (originally la Cadie, derived from some Indian name).* Here the original French policy had been to hope that 'our sons will marry your daughters and we will become one people'. Unfortunately, this did not happen in a way that suited the French, since the early tendency was for arriving male settlers to go native, and bring up their children in their sauvage mothers' languages. In 1666, after three generations of French colonial presence, Louis XIV's minister for the colonies, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, complained that Frenchmen who wanted to trade-mostly for furs-still had to communicate in the natives' language.36 Part of the solution to this was to send out well-brought-up French girls, filles a marier, to marry the settlers and create French-speaking homes. Among them were the famous filles du Roy, 'king's daughters', mostly orphans from bourgeois families, whose travel and subsistence costs-and in some cases dowries-were borne by the Treasury. Some nine hundred of them were sent out between 1665 and 1673, to boost the population (3215 according to the census of 1665), and improve the s.e.x ratio (2:1 male to female). Although the intendant of the colony, Jean Talon, told Colbert that he would have preferred village girls, ready to work like men, rather than these delicate young ladies, they seem to have been a good investment. The population of Nouvelle-France reached 20,000 in 1713 and 55,000 in 1755. The fertility rate averaged a whopping 7.8 children per woman. Although only some 40 per cent of the immigrants spoke un bon francais, over half of the women did, and the variant dialects of the immigrant families seem to have been levelled out in the seventeenth century, in favour of standard French learnt at Mother's knee. In 1698 the Controller-General of the navy remarked: 'People speak here perfectly well without any bad accent. Although there is a mixture from almost all the provinces in France, none of their dialects can be distinguished in the Canadian provinces.'37 And the marquess of Montcalm, the French general who was to lose the city of Quebec to the British in 1759, had previously admitted: 'The Canadian peasants speak French very well.'38 The Treaty of Paris in 1763 spelt the end of France's empire in North America. American France yielded to the overpowering numbers in the British colonies, even if the coup de grsce had come from the dominance of the British navy in the Atlantic* The French defeat did not, however, put paid to French-speaking in the north-east. Even though Canada soon became the destination for large numbers of English-speaking loyalists from the Thirteen Colonies, unwilling to live in an independent United States of America, the French were still vastly preponderant, approximately by a factor of seven, in the settled areas of what was still a territory with a small European population. It is estimated that in 1791 there were 140,000 francophones and 20,000 anglophones in Canada. The French have since put up a redoubtable defence of their community's existence, polarised around the Catholic Church, French civil law and the continued use of their language.

They were, however, increasingly joined by immigrants who either spoke or adopted English, and certainly by the midpoint of the next century, when the European population was about 1.5 million, French speakers had ceased to be the majority. And the population movements had not yet peaked. Another 2.3 million were admitted between 1821 and 1910.39 In 1998 the country's population had reached 30.5 million, of whom 6.7 million or 22 per cent spoke French natively, as against 60 per cent brought up to speak English.

Despite this disappointing finale, Canada is the main success story of French as transplanted overseas. But it is certainly not the only story. France had also had a major piece of the action in the sugar business, and throughout the seventeenth century the most populous francophone colony had in fact been the French Antilles, Guadeloupe and Martinique: by 1700 they were home to 25,000 French and 70,000 black slaves.40 Their descendants are still there, with a population now of just over a million, all speaking French, or French creoles. Haiti too, becoming French in 1697 through the action of pirates (filibusters), became prosperous in the same business, although the French owners' term was ended violently by slave revolution in 1804. There too French and French creoles are spoken to this day, by some 7.5 million. The other colonies of the French Crown were either trading posts in highly populated regions (Chandernagore, Yanam, Pondicherry, Karaikal and Mahe along the coast of India), way-stations on naval routes to India (Senegal, the islands of Reunion and Mauritius, and (briefly) Madagascar) or the rumps of larger-scale conquests that never worked out (French Guiana).* None of them ever attracted major settlement from Europe, though almost all of them host small francophone communities to this day, notably 40,000 still in Pondicherry; and 160,500 can speak French in Reunion, amid half a million (90 per cent of the island's population) who speak a French creole.41 The French Revolution ushered in a new phase of imperial wars, but with the exception of Napoleon's somewhat romantic foray to Egypt in 1798-9, they were all waged within the continent of Europe; and they all amounted, in less than a generation, to nothing at all. Ironically, the great claims to fame of France in the early modern period, the Revolution and the reign of Napoleon, contributed little if anything to the spread of the French language, even if they sent French-speaking soldiers all over Europe.

But then, with the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, the French entered on a new bout of overseas imperialism.

The second empire

Their motives were mixed. In one important case, France acted like ancient Rome, when in 1830 an attempt to rid the Mediterranean of pirates ended up with the full-scale invasion of Algeria, detaching what had been a province of the Ottoman empire. Still in accord with the Roman model, this was followed by an influx of settlers (coloni for the Romans, colons for the French), in fairly large numbers: there were already 110,000 of them in 1847, and their numbers rose to just under a million in the next century.42 But this was an exceptional case, even though it loomed largest in French conceptions of their new empire. In many other cases, French action was led by missionary compa.s.sion or zeal, as with the protectorates claimed in the Indian Ocean (Comores, 1840) and in the Pacific (in les iCles de la Societe, 1843, Tahiti, 1846, Nouvelle-Caledonie, 1853). Similar motives, at some level, seem to have led to the expansion of French control from its ancient base in Senegal in the fifty years from 1817, training native infantry (tirailleurs) and priests and then taking action against malaria, and building schools and roads. It was persecution of Christian missions that gave France its justification for invading Cochin-China in 1859: by 1887 a French Union indochinoise controlled the whole of what is now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

But these colonial acquisitions came at a time when Europeans were beginning to be highly impressed by their own technical superiority over people anywhere else in the world. Once again France began to look for explanations of its success: characteristically, it came to see itself as a power that could make a difference to the world for the better, spreading not just Catholic Christianity and respect for law, but also freemasonry, Saint-Simonian industrial policy, and in short la civilisation franaise. It was easy to combine this with an ambition to do well while doing good, and so there were few reservations felt when France, and Belgium too, joined in 'la course aux colonies', what Britain knew as 'the scramble for Africa'.

The French and the British were the big winners in the sheer scale of territory acquired: both empires grew ma.s.sively in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The French expanded from their existing possessions in Algeria and Senegal, but they also established new bridgeheads in Cote d'Ivoire (1842) and Gabon (1843). First, from 1876 to 1885, Afrique-equatoriale Franaise (French Equatorial Africa) was carved out from the Gabon sh.o.r.e, including what were to become Gabon, Congo, the Central African Republic and Chad; then from 1883 to 1894 Afrique-Occidentale Francaise (French West Africa) was taken from the west and south-west, comprising the modern Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger and Benin.

And the French were not the only francophones in the race. In 1877-9, Belgium's King Leopold, adopting as his personal agent the British explorer Sir Henry Stanley, had brazenly claimed the area now known as the Congo, a claim accepted by the other European powers in 1885. Then, in 1896, the French went on to depose the queen of Madagascar, justifying their action by the immediate abolition of slavery in her old domains. And on top of it all, France was also claiming protectorates among Algeria's neighbours along the Mediterranean coast, Tunisia in 1881, and Morocco in 1912.

By 1913, French was the language of the rulers of a good third of Africa's land area, from the Atlas mountains on the north Atlantic to the Great Lakes of the Rift Valley. It was an expansion to compare with the adventures of Alexander, or the great Muslim jihad of the seventh century: fifty years earlier, the language had not been heard in Africa outside Algeria and Senegal.

In many ways, the French exerted themselves to be worthy of their sudden new domains, bringing roads, railways and the telegraph, scientific a.s.saults on malaria and other tropical diseases, as well as the Christian faith, the French language, and-to a few privileged souls-an appreciation of Cartesian rationalism. They do seem to have succeeded in transmitting to their subjects a sense that the only practicable route to power and independence lay through mastery of their own skills: this kind of persuasion was one of their ideals, what they called rayonnement, 'beaming'. Far more than other European empires, they struggled with the question of what their true interest in these subjects was: exploitation, a.s.similation, evangelisation, education or simple political a.s.sociation. Was it la gloire that France was seeking, or sa mission civilisatrice? Taking their own culture so seriously, the French could not see these domains as anything other than parts of France: la civilisation francaise was indivisible. Everywhere French was used for administration, and inst.i.tuted as the language of instruction in secondary and higher education, even where-as in Indo-China and North Africa-there was an ancient tradition of literacy in some other language.* Colonials could in most places aspire to full French citizens.h.i.+p.

But, except in Algeria-where the native, Muslim, population were far less ready to see their Christian conquerors as role models-the French were always too thin on the ground truly to propagate their own society. There were few solid economic reasons to bring them out to these countries, or to keep them there, and rather soon it showed. In contrast to what happened in the other European empires, the typical Frenchman abroad remained a military man, a doctor, a missionary or a teacher. Napoleon, the pre-eminent French soldier, had famously slighted England as 'une nation de pet.i.ts commerants'-a nation of shopkeepers-but it was precisely the lack of such people in the French colonies which demonstrated how unstable they were. Unlike Portuguese, Spanish, British or even Dutch possessions, there was no part of the French empire which attracted ma.s.s immigration. And the French government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not able or willing, as it had been in the seventeenth, to finance any emigration. Consequently, French remained, everywhere but Algeria, a language of the governing elite, even while-at least in black Africa-the rest of the population might be heartily aspiring to its values.

The number of colonies under French-speaking administration grew after the end of the First World War, when the German and Ottoman possessions were parcelled out. Cameroon and Togo came to France, and Rwanda and Burundi to Belgium. Syria and Lebanon were also placed under a French mandate. But almost all were granted independence in the fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The Near Eastern Arab countries were established as independent republics as part of the immediate post-war settlement. Indo-China and North Africa, as well as Madagascar and the Comoros, had to win their freedom by force of arms; in sub-Saharan Africa, by and large they were granted it at their earnest entreaty in 1960. The tiny nations of the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America are still, in effect, part of the empire: but they are now part of the French Union: according to the const.i.tution adopted by the referendum of 27 October 1946, la France forme avec les peuples d' outre-mer une Union fondee sur l' egalite des droits et des devoirs, sans distinction de race ni de religion.

France forms with the overseas peoples a Union founded on equality of rights and duties, without distinction of race nor religion.

And all its members as ressortissants (i.e. when they come to France) are French citizens. It is noticeable that language is not included as an aspect in which the Union is free from distinction: that is because in the Union, everyone's language is expected to be French.

In conformity with its explicit respect for clarity and reason, the French-language community seeks to order itself, and have an overall conception of itself, apparently far more than any other. So it is characteritic that it has given itself an international political, technical and cultural organisation, known as la francophonie. It is a matter of some satisfaction to the French government that the initiative for this came not from France but from a number of distinguished second-language speakers. Still, there may perhaps have been a certain political motivation: the founders were President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, President Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Charles Helou of Lebanon, and Hamani Diori of Niger. Nevertheless, France does provide up to two-thirds of the organisation's budget. It was founded on 20 March 1970 at Niamey in Niger, central Africa, and has held summit meetings regularly, with cabinet ministers in attendance, the ninth at Beirut in 2002. Members.h.i.+p is not restricted to former colonies of France; indeed, Egypt recently provided the secretary-general, Boutros Boutros Ghali: characteristically it chooses to emphasise some conceptual or moral, rather than historic, relatedness.

Its current emphasis, rather surprisingly, is on protecting and enabling cultural diversity, certainly a novelty as a francophone preoccupation, and not without a whiff of l' esprit malin, Gallic mischief, directed at the perennial rivals, les anglo-saxons. But it is well within the tradition of incisive, and sometimes disinterested, consideration of the rights of man. Political interests will out, however, and it has been difficult for the French state, in recent years, even to protect and foster such linguistic diversity as remains within its own domains. The action of the minister of education in 2002, for example, aimed at incorporating Breton-language schools into the state system, and so funding them nationally, fell foul of an article inserted into the French const.i.tution as late as 1992-that the language of the French Republic is French.*

The Third Rome, and all the Russias

But to turn away from the window on Europe is hard, that is a fact. But, that being said, Asia-this could really be our exodus in our future-again I exclaim it! And if we could accomplish the mastery of that idea, even in part, oh, what a root would then be revitalized! Asia, our Asiatic Russia,-this too is our sick root, which we need not just to refresh, but utterly to resurrect and reconstruct! A principle, a new principle, a new view on the affair, here is what is necessary!

Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Gok-Tepe: What Is Asia to Us?, 188143 Russian, the last of the great European languages spread by an empire, is in many ways unlike the others.